


You Didn't Do Anything (You Are Everything)

by Nythil



Series: From the Redacted Files of Cipher Nine [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Firen'kesho'ardu is an angry chiss, Idiot Spy Boyfriend, Imperial Agent Storyline Spoilers, Lana Beniko - Freeform, One Shot, Set after the battle for corellian shipyards, Short, Sort of? - Freeform, Spite Fic, briefly, female cipher nine - Freeform, female imperial agent - Freeform, hurt/comfort with only hurt and off screen presumed comfort, i wasn't sure how to end it, let me yell at theron shan, mostly just theron realizing he did a dumb thing, now an idiot spy husband, snowballed spite fic, the angst isn't my fault, theron shan - Freeform, with a not totally bad ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:48:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23358781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nythil/pseuds/Nythil
Summary: After the battle on Corellia for the shipyards, a newly Republic-aligned Firen'kesho'ardu returns to Lana Beniko, her friend, and Theron Shan, her husband. No battle ends without casualties, but Theron seems to have forgotten that when he accuses Firen of doing nothing to save people. She corrects him.
Relationships: Female Imperial Agent | Cipher Nine/Theron Shan
Series: From the Redacted Files of Cipher Nine [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1680079
Comments: 3
Kudos: 19





	You Didn't Do Anything (You Are Everything)

Theron couldn’t stop it. Firen had walked up at just the right - or wrong - moment. Tempers had flared (though later, he would admit that only his temper was lost) and words slipped. The stress they had been under was getting to him. He knew. He also knew that he shouldn’t let it and that he should be better at ensuring it didn’t.

Lana was right, after all; they were at war. But at just that moment it was had been all too easy to shift the anger he felt and the blame he was desperate to place from his friend to his wife. 

“You didn’t do anything.” 

As soon as the words left him, Theron wished he could take them back. Firen’kesho’ardu’s face changed briefly, so fast that Theron doubted anyone, but he noticed. He had come to understand and recognize her micro-expressions, the ones she used to hide any real emotions behind after years of being an agent. 

Her face showed hurt. 

Firen narrowed her eyes - for targets, a sign of danger. 

“You think I didn’t do anything?” 

Theron nearly stumbled over his words. 

“Not to stop the bombard-” 

“I’ve done everything I can!” Firen’s voice pitched, thready with suppressed exhaustion, “I’ve stood in front the Dark Council and lied. Two members have died because of my work. I sabotage anything I can. There’s only so much I can do, Theron!” 

She paused, fighting to keep her voice both quiet and even.

“You know force users can sense dishonesty, right?” Firen made a point of glancing at Lana. Though the sith stayed silent, she nodded in confirmation. “If I interfere too much, I might as well just run myself through with one of their lightsabers preemptively,” she finished with her arms crossed, glaring at Theron. 

As intimidating as Theron had always found her unbroken red gaze to be, he could look past it, enough to notice the slight glisten of moistness in her eyes. It made keeping eye contact difficult. 

So he didn’t. 

Instead, he looked at the floor, hands on his hips. 

“I’m not saying you did it on purpose, Fir-” 

She cut him off. 

“But you are saying it’s all my fault.” Firen’s hands flexed at her sides, curling into fists, “You think it doesn’t bother me? That I joined the Republic so I could continue being an agent and kill people that I, as the Alliance Commander, am personally supposed to be helping?”

Theron’s throat suddenly felt very dry, his chest tighter. He couldn’t think of any words, so he stayed quiet, crossing his arms and inspecting the floor tiles. 

He didn’t miss Firen’s forceful wiping away of an errant tear that she hadn’t permitted to fall. 

To say that seeing Firen be genuinely emotional was rare would be a vast understatement. Years of being an agent hadn’t taught her only how to fake emotions but also to hide her true ones as if her life depended on it; often, her life  _ had _ depended on it. Lying well enough to fool a force user was a rare ability amongst intelligence agents on either side. 

Seeing her wipe away a tear made Theron’s heart clench painfully tighter. 

After spending her entire childhood being trained to join Imperial Intelligence and then the majority of her adult life in service to it with no hope of defection made of all of...this, a touchy subject. 

Something that Theron already knew. 

“I thought,” Firen’s voice dropped to just above a whisper, “that after everything I could finally be free of the Empire. I thought I was done with the government that let a sith kill my friend for misplacing his tie.”

Theron reached for her instinctively. 

Firen pulled her arm out of his reach. 

“You know why I can’t support the Republic openly, Theron? You know why I have to be a double agent?”

“I -” 

Once more, Firen stopped him from replying. 

“I’ll remind you. Because the Republic doesn’t want me to. The Republic doesn’t _ want me to,  _ Theron. None of this was my idea. I didn’t even get a say.  _This,”_ Firen gestured around them, “wasn’t _a choice.”_

She fixed her gaze on the floor. 

“I thought,” Firen said slowly, “that by joining the Republic I had finally found people with whom I could enjoy mutual trust,” her voice cracked slightly, “I thought I already did.” 

In an instant, Firen smoothed her face, clearing away any trace of emotion. Her posture straightened, her features hardened into a wall of professionality. 

“Perhaps I miscounted how many of those people there are.” 

Theron’s heart cracked. 

“Excuse me; I need to go think about how I _personally_ let everyone on Corellia die.”

Firen turned on her heel and walked away.

To anyone outside of Theron and Lana, it would appear as a confident stride; but they knew. They could see the Commander’s distress in her gait, in how her heels slowed ever so slightly before touching the ground; it was a learned behaviour to keep emotion from making her footfalls too loud. 

For a moment, silence encroached on the void Firen’s voice had left. 

Lana broke it. 

“I...I would speak to her if I were you. Apologize - and you  _ should _ \- to her. Though, perhaps you should wait until she has removed her weapons,” she advised before turning away and leaving as well. 

Theron, now alone, slumped down in his chair and dropped his head into his hands. 

_ That...could have gone better.  _

In the quiet, his words echoed back to him. 

_ “You didn’t do anything.”  _

The anger that had backed the harsh accusation had drained. 

He should have known better. 

As a spy, Theron knew Firen risking her cover would have resulted in both the mission and herself dying at the end of a lightsaber. In total, he loathed admitting, the task of undermining the Empire’s tactics and feeding information to the Republic would save trillions of lives more than stopping Krovos from firing on Corellia would have, even  _ if _ it had worked. Short of hijacking the ship, Theron wasn’t even sure what Firen could have done to stop it; even for the Commander, taking over a fully armed sith warship alone was a tall order. The death toll of Corellia was the lesser evil, and what Lana said was true. Of course, it was. A defining feature of any war was the civilian casualties. Theron knew this and was intimately aware of how closely acquainted with the concept Firen was as well.

As Firen’s long time friend and advisor, Theron knew that she had indeed done all she could. The woman was the least imperial-like imperial he had ever met, despite being raised on their capital world - something he loved about her. Even as the top agent, infamous Cipher Nine, she had kept her mission sharply focused on the target; Firen always preferred to spare those she could, regardless of their status towards her quarry. 

“Excessive collateral damage can alert people,” she had offered when Theron first asked. 

He knew the truth, though. 

As her husband, Theron knew how many nights Firen had awoken from a nightmare about her past, reaching for the blaster she no longer kept under the pillow. He knew the times when her facade slipped, invisible to anyone but him, knew how she struggled with being Chiss, an official Empire-aligned species, and tried to make people see past her blue skin to the good in her heart. He knew the feel of her shaking in his arms, crying tears she would never admit existed because she dreamt that she had lost him.

Theron knew  _ her _ . 

When he had seemingly betrayed the Alliance - betrayed her, Theron reminded himself reluctantly - for an undercover mission she didn’t know what even occurring, Firen had understood. She had welcomed him back - to the Alliance, to her ( _ their _ ) bed, to her heart. 

To home. 

And yet here he was, accusing her of doing nothing when he knew what she had to go through. 

The stark crimson of Firen’s angry eyes and the bitter sounds from her tongue conjured itself into his mind without permission. 

_ Why did I say that?  _

The last time Theron had called her callous was on Ziost, nearly six years ago, for killing the triple agent. 

He let slip a dry chuckle. 

_ I don’t even remember the guy’s name.  _

The longer he sat alone with his thoughts, the worse Theron felt. 

_ “Perhaps I miscounted how many of those people there are.” _

He could have sworn he heard his heart fragment. 

Theron wasn’t sure what he would do if Firen left him, let alone losing her to any of the dangerous missions and lies she was forced to tell as a double agent... _ again _ , he reminded himself, recalling that the last time she was made to it was the Republic messing around in her head. 

_ “You didn’t do anything.” _

Firen had done  _ everything. _

More than almost anyone else in the last decade, probably. Working on both sides and independently, Firen had likely saved countless lives. 

Maybe even Theron’s.

Firen was  _ everything. _

**Author's Note:**

> Hi!  
> So, this was my first fic for the SWTOR fandom. I've been playing the game since the beta, but I never really had the inspiration to write for it until that one line. And of course, Bioware didn't let me reply, so I had to write a short spite-fic immediately, which snowballed into this.  
> I hope it was a decent read! Thank you for checking it out. If you have any ideas for other scenarios involving Firen, feel free to suggest them! This is just one fic in what will eventually be a collection of them about her. 
> 
> Thanks,  
> Nythil


End file.
